Atheist Blogger- the godlessvagina / Podcaster the pink atheist

Monthly Archives: April 2013

I remember the moment like my eyes were opened for the first time. It was reality, and it was there and unavoidable. I once watched a movie called labyrinth and the girl shatters a mirror and the reality she thought was true shattered before her. That is how I felt. Until that moment I was apathetic, but still a believer, but I remember a time when I was so much more.

The thing is, I really wanted to believe. I didn’t want to be alone. Most of my life was hard and at times I needed someone, but that night I looked around, and like I woke from a dream, there was nothing. No god, nothing. I had lived my life till then being good for good sake, always in fear of hell and damnation. Suddenly all I could see is that there was no barrier between me and reality. Nothing protecting or keeping me.

I had wanted to believe for years. I prayed, I fasted, I read the bible, didn’t cuss, wore my clothes to cover my body, and kept myself from lust. I was the sparkling gem in my own mind, for god. I believed and when there came doubt, I shut it out. I hated non believes, and homosexuals. I believed that god would punish them, and I would be in his favor. I would lay down my life for him, if given the chance. I was the best of the best for god.

Then life came, and nothing was as it should have been. I was disappointed as I watched a five year old little boy die from a tumor, and the cancer that followed. I can still remember his screams as they changed the bandages that covered the tubes going into his chest to deliver the chemo. One day I was walking around on the floor of the hospital just for children with cancers, and it hit me how unfair this was. Little children as pale as death lying in beds, and most of them would not go home.

I was able to distance myself from that by thinking that god knew what he was doing and why. That it was not for me to question his divine plan, but secretly I did. Inside I burned with anger that this was happening. Over and over the question of why came to my mind. It was disturbing. It was actually why I became apathetic. I conformed god to fit what I needed. He became what I wanted him to be. He would love me and understand my flaws. He would not have a problem with who I was, because he made me, and so if I was flawed, then he was responsible for that too.

After that night, I couldn’t even live with that lie. It was my most precious of lies. I told it to myself over and over almost every day. But the words that came out of my mouth gave away my doubts, and fears. They let it out that I was not that good of a christian, and that there was more I was hiding. When the mirror of my life shattered, I had nothing left to hold on to. I knew I was alone. I looked at the sky and saw it was empty above me. I saw the world around, and it was void of any being who would swoop in and save me from the tragedies of my life.

That was when I realized, I was responsible for me. I had to be the one to take charge of my life, and it was hard. I wanted someone to blame, to thank, to turn to, to run to, and hide from the sorrows of the world. What I found was that I had only me and I had to get stronger every day. It was baby steps, and it has been since. I had a lot of growing up to do, and it all seemed overwhelming. It still does. Sometimes I find things that are rooted deep in my mind, and I have to pull them out, and it is painful at best.

I realized everything I saw me as, and everything I was was given to me by religion. I came out of it unsure who I was and who I should be. I was confused, and angry, and hurt, betrayed, and scared. I realized I was not angry at a god I didn’t believe in, no I was angry at a lie, one I believed in so long. One that took up so much of my life and who I was. One that made me hate my flaws and imperfections.

Every day when I wage war on god, it is not because I believe in the myth. But because I want others to not waste their lives believing in the myth, and fearing the myth, and never knowing who they are because they can’t even have the right to be the person they really want to be deep down. Instead you bargain with the lie, you manuever around the lie. You say it over and over and over, with hopes that one day it will be true. That never happens.

Now that I am an atheist, a recovering atheist, recovering my life that is, I know how many people feel. The need for it to be true and the desire is there, but the god isn’t. The tragedy is so many people live the lie, and live it well. So well they can’t see beyond it. It is like the dream you never wake from, the desire you can’t let go of. For many people god is real because he is in their heads, and that is what keeps him alive, but what they don’t realize, is that it is all an illusion, a delusion of our own creation. Once you start listening to everyone tell you about their god, you realize there are billions of them, and everyone is different because of the mind it possesses.

The newly elected pope speaks volumes to the extent religion will go to continue the paralyzing sickness that it plagues upon humanity. Laws against gay marriage, women and the right to their bodies, assaults on real liberties, and continued hate speech disguised as nothing grander than biblical literature. It continues day after day, even as the clerics flee from the hate and sickness that is poisoning them as well. It seems the new century has shown us a few things. One of them is the darkest side of religion. The need for death, and hate, and fear to perpetuate as much as possible, or dare to risk loosing its perpetual victims by the droves, and what better way to manipulate the populous than to distort reality.

Religion may not have been created for power and control, but it has been usurped for such a twisted cause. In fact it has become the leading tenet of the religious doctrine. Foregoing many of the old laws to invoke the greatest fear of all. The question of homosexuality seems to be a keep. Since many people fear what they are inherently unwilling to understand. Since the church has spent a inordinate amount of time perpetuating homosexuality as unnatural, it is a ready cliff to utilize on the masses as a continued cycle of fear, especially among religious males who fear homosexuality and gay sex. Not because the reality of that sex is anything different than heterosexual sex, but because they fear they would like it.

Religion is fascinated with the continued victimhood of those who follow, and revel in it. It uses the masses and the fear pre built into our heads to control when people feel safe, and how they feel safe. Like the history of our evolution, they promise that there are things we could not understand or dare to ever understand without them. The lead people like sheep to the slaughter to a place of irrational hope and fear entwined. That something beyond them can save them from that which defines our humanity. The inability to control our world and what inevitable will happen to us all. The lack of security we face every day, with no promise of anything supernatural. The truth that we are alone, and we have to sustain ourselves on the fact that all we have united is each other.

The poisoning of minds is not just an effect of the sickness embedded in the religious doctrines, but it is perpetuated by those who are highly infected with the virus of it. Facing the reality of the world is beyond many of them, like a veil over their eyes. When religion has nothing to offer in reality, it has fear and promises of useless things in the next world, life, or heaven as you would call it. Who needs gold when it has no value? Who needs pearls, or castles, or milk and honey, when you can’t own, feel, taste or touch it with the senses attached to your physical form. In essence they sold you something which only has the value you place on it now, here in this life with the promise that it will continue to have the same value in the next. Yet we place every value on these things. That is our doing, but who is our? Who told you, and made you believe that gold is worth more than any other metal or rock? That is what you were taught to believe.

Who told you that milk and honey unlimited were things which were crucial to happiness, when you couldn’t sense anything. Heaven is a lie, and a promise of everything you never had, and never will have, with the hope that you will forget how frail and fragile this life and all that is in it really is. It is the denial of self and the reality that we suffer and grow old only to die and be replaced by new life. It sells you everything you want, and wanted. To never be separated from those who you grew to love and be bonded to, to never have to face loosing them and knowing that nothing will ever bring them back. Heaven is the worst lie of all, because it stops you from looking at reality on the light it needs to be. The light of seeing every person, and every moment as precious. To be used to touch as many lives as possible, and connect with them, and let others know, we may have no gods but we are never alone, unloved, or unwanted.

The doctrines of nomadic herdsmen, who could not imagine what the reality of the world and life is told each other stories. Those stories became books of legend and holy doctrines passed on through the ages. They became useful to men and women willing to enslave, manipulate, and harm others. They were written by men with agendas, and hate for things they feared. Why else would you sacrifice virgins, stone women, and cast curses on people. Because these men were paralyzed by their fears, and they were willing to paralyze others, and systematically that fear encompassed every continent on this planet, until the world was cloaked in darkness and fear. Those are what we call the dark ages, and it was only curiosity, and resolving to not fear which moved us out of them. It was finding that there are more explanations to things which gave us the forward momentum. Now religion lives in fear of that momentum, knowing that day by day, their numbers and power over us are dwindling. While it may seem they are on the rise.

The small minded ones who rose to the top know their actions are futile. That they will face the future where religion is no longer the most important thing in our world, and we will still live on. But they are terrified that their morals, dictated to them from an archaic book, will cease to exist, and will be replaced by the morality of human will to just be good to their fellow man, and religion will no longer paralyze the masses and hold control. Their need for control is almost incessant. They need the money to continue to indoctrinate, and get more money. God seems bent on keeping the masses down and the money flowing. Heaven seems to need blood and gold most of all.

The lie we were sold and the indoctrination was unjustified. It was perpetuated by people who were beaten, and forced not to think, or to question. People who, through fear, only came to know more religion and quietly king to it, or face the oppression of religion from reality. It is a useless form of bribery to promise people what you can never be sure is delivered. Since no one can verify that they have seen heaven, and angel or god, or can even verify the validity of the archaic book it stems from, why buy into the lie? Why believe that without your brain, and your senses you could surpass humanity by doing things we know to belong to only the senses and that is enjoy such elaborate things as heaven promises. Instead rest assured that out time here is limited, and for all the good, and bead, the mistakes, and the tears, and laughter, this is our one trip around the sun, in the same direction ending in our death. There is nothing more to be gained or promised. Nothing but the frail humanity we hold so fragile in our hands.